President's Address to the University Community

April 27, 2011

It is with
pleasure that I greet you on this April day and hope that you all feel, as do
I, the wonderful, energizing gift of spring.
Just when the burdens of the year were beginning to get us down, here
comes the sun, the blooms, the green that says "Go!" and, today, the taking of a
moment to eat some ice cream and to glance backwards over our shoulders and see
behind us with some surprise and justifiable satisfaction the accomplishments
of the year.

In addition to a re-born earth, April also always brings us
the full-blown and rather less glorious commencement of the annual New Jersey
budget battle, which, this year promises to provide drama that is heightened,
even by this state’s standards. The
higher education budget proposed by Governor Christie and most likely to be
adopted by the Legislature, although this cannot be certain at this time,
carries this year’s level of appropriation into next year, in other words, a
flat budget. We will continue to push
for additional funding as the budget moves through the legislative process, but
after several years of painful cuts in operating support for state colleges and
universities, a level budget could actually represent a first step in restoring
at least some minimal adequacy to higher education funding in New Jersey.

As you know, the senior public institutions in New Jersey
are woefully underfunded. The proposed
budget for the next fiscal year for the nine state college and universities,
including Montclair State, provides operating support approximately equal to
what it was in 1997, when the sector enrolled 28,000 fewer students. If we look at what has happened just over the
last decade, in the 2001-2002 academic year, the state provided Montclair State
$4,500 in operating support per full-time equivalent student. In the proposed budget for the 2011-2012
academic year, operating support per FTE student will drop to about $2,500. When the effects of inflation are also
included, the level of support is so low as not to be justifiable or reasonable
by any standard.

As in the past, the lack of state support for higher
education will not deter the University from moving forward on its long-term
strategic goals. From FY2001 through FY2011,
the University’s operating budget more than doubled, growing from $141 million
to $316 million. This increase reflected
enrollment growth, an increase in full-time faculty positions and academic
programs, and enhancements to information technology, facilities, academic support
services, and student housing.

With level funding next year, we will continue to focus on
using available resources as wisely and efficiently as possible and on
generating additional revenue from non-state sources wherever feasible. To the greatest extent possible, we will
observe the following principles:

Budgets
will be developed with a long-term perspective and will protect core academic
programs.

We
will continue to recruit highly qualified faculty in response to continued
enrollment growth.

We
will provide the facilities and equipment necessary for high-quality academic
programs.

We
will protect the workforce of the University, which is responsible for our
extraordinary achievements of the last decade.

At the same time, we will continue to exert budgetary
discipline by following such principles as:

exercising
rigorous review before filling any vacant position or creating any new
position;

applying
rigorous standards to every hire and personnel action;

using
every instructional, administrative, and student service resource as
efficiently as possible;

improving
both academic and business practices, seeking out additional efficiencies that
will also yield greater quality;

eliminating
programs and activities that, while beneficial, constitute areas for which
there is less demand, or where we cannot achieve high quality, or that are
lower institutional priorities.

I have asked department chairs,
deans, directors, and vice presidents to exercise very thorough and careful
budget discipline in regard to everything from course offerings, class sizes,
and scheduling to expenditures for any non-essential activities or materials. The FY2012 budget process has begun and will
continue over the next two months with the participation of all of the
University’s many units. Please feel
free to bring any ideas and questions you might have to your division and
department heads.

One of the characteristics of
Montclair State University has been our effort to maintain a unified, coherent,
and integrated university, even as we grow and develop, and not to devolve, as
is so often the case in large universities, into many disaggregated parts simply
co-existing within the umbrella of a university, but essentially unrelated one
to the other. For that reason, I want to
review today several of the significant areas of activity that have been taking
place over the year across the institution.

These activities share a common
goal: to position the University, its programs, and its faculty and staff to be
prepared to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving higher education
environment within a context in which we can no longer rely on the historical patterns
of financial support. These efforts are
often not visible or well understood across the full campus community, but they
should be, because we all need to be building the same University, and each
unit and division of the University needs to be leveraging its strengths and
efforts with those of other units.

Beginning with the School of Business, under the
leadership of Dean Chrite, it has focused its attention on a number of critical
areas that will enable it to meet more effectively the needs of students and
their potential employers and to compete successfully in what has become a very
crowded and competitive management education marketplace. The School undertook a comprehensive and strategic
review of its undergraduate and graduate curricular structure, with the goal of
developing a curriculum that is more integrated, more dynamic, and that fuses
academic rigor with market relevance. The
School developed an integrated core curriculum at the undergraduate level and
built essential professional development and experiential learning activities
into the curricular sequence. At the MBA
level, they created a cohort experience, enhanced the global component of the
curriculum, and, responding to the needs of some returning students, included a
pre-program refresher session.

The School has also begun to work intensively on
repositioning the brand or the identity of the School of Business within the
overall University effort being led by University Advancement. There are a lot of business programs out there,
and the School’s ability to create an identity and leverage it in this
marketplace will be essential if it is to achieve its strategic goals. Consequently, they have begun focusing on issues
related to how they launch new initiatives, market their programs, position and
support faculty, and articulate an unambiguous value proposition.

The School has also made a significant effort to
expand beneficial and reciprocal partnerships with public and private sector organizations. Examples of such activities include Lemonade
Day, bringing an introduction to entrepreneurship to over a thousand children
in Essex County; a partnership with Prudential in the School’s inaugural case
competition; the creation of apprentice-type programs for students with area
businesses; and increasing the School’s consulting engagements, for example the
engagement with Smash burger (a new burger chain) on market positioning.

These curricular and outreach activities have
relevance for the whole University beyond the School of Business. Their curricular changes will have an impact
on other programs and also provide interesting models for colleagues to
consider and opportunities for curricular integrations beyond the School of
Business. Their outreach to
organizations and businesses in the community open doors through which the
initiatives of other programs may enter.

Indeed, in working with Prudential, for example, the School of Business
is trading on an extremely positive relationship that the College of Education
and Human Services has nurtured with that corporation over many years. And they should trade on it. Indeed, every time one of our programs works
with an external organization, they are carrying with them the reputation, not
just of their particular program, but of the whole University, and they are
creating an opportunity, not just for their program, but for the whole
University. In a similar way, the School
of Business has pursued its work cognizant of the fact that in strengthening its
academic foundations, the School is building on a legacy that is consistent
with the aspirations and the quality of the whole University.

Historically,
the excellent reputation of Montclair State has been buttressed by its
long-standing reputation for having superb programs in teacher education. Today, the University has expanded its
reputation by its strengths in other programmatic areas. However, it is still the case that, when it
comes to national rankings, Education is the one area where we are regularly
recognized as among the best in the country.

The
College of Education and Human Services is, of course, justifiably proud of its
reputation, but the members of that College are aware of the fact that they
need to continue to work hard to retain and to improve on their current standing
and the quality of their programs. When
the College works at that goal, it is elevating its own endeavors, but it is also
elevating the reputation of the whole University; we all get to bask in the
glow.

Under
Dean Cutler’s leadership and in pursuit of the College goal to be among the
best in the nation at what it does, the College has placed particular attention
this year on doctoral education. The
reputation of the College’s programs and faculty, together with the innovative
high quality of its new doctoral program in Teacher Education and Teacher
Development, brought in over 100 applicants from across the country for the
second year cohort. The College selected
15 outstanding applicants from the pool, and all of them have accepted our
offer of admission.

In
addition, the PhD in Counselor Education has also accepted 15 exceptional
students from a large pool of applicants for its third cohort. Within a few years, these programs will have
a major impact on New Jersey leadership in the fields of counseling and teacher
education and development. They will
also expand the University’s reputation as a doctoral granting University,
which will enhance recruitment for other existing and potential doctoral
programs.

Looking
realistically at the very significant changes occurring in the master’s level
marketplace, the College of Education and Human Services has begun a rigorous
effort to expand its models of program delivery to reach students in new ways
and in more places. These new models
include both the development of on-line programs and face-to-face programs
offered in ways that are more convenient and better tailored to the schedules
of working adults. Some examples include
a master’s degree in Reading and a certificate in working with English Language
Learners delivered in Paterson for cohorts of teachers and certificate and
master’s degree programs for principals and supervisors in Colts Neck, Boonton,
and other school districts. These
programs provide models that may be viable for other programs across the
University, and they also open doors through which other University programs
might enter.

Overall,
the quality of the College’s programs has enabled its graduates to win
significant recognition, for example, one the graduates from the new Master of
Public Health program has been awarded one of two prestigious fellowships with
the University of California San Diego Medical Center, from among 130 national
applicants. Every time a Montclair State
University student gets accepted to a prestigious graduate program or wins a
prestigious fellowship, it increases the plausibility of candidates from all of
our programs for these opportunities.

We
know from data gathered through the NSSE studies, that Montclair State
students, particularly at the upper division, do not always feel as challenged
or as engaged in their programs as we would wish them to be. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences,
led by Dean Morrissey, has focused attention on this issue over the past year
and worked on a number of initiatives that they hope will better engage
undergraduate students in their academic studies. In particular, the College has targeted
undergraduate research experiences, providing travel funds for students who
read conference papers at regional and national conferences and increasing
participation in the MSU Student Research Symposium.

That
extremely successful Symposium took place on Saturday, April 16, and over 250
students from throughout the University filled University Hall with the largest
Student Research Symposium ever held on this campus. This event was a very successful
cross-college collaboration, with student researchers from every college and
school presenting posters and reading papers on subjects from “Internet Addiction:
is it Time to Unplug?” to “The Sovereign Credit Crisis in the Euro Zone” to
“The Role of PC12 Cells in Neural Experimentations” to “The Migration of Zooplankton.”

Another
collaborative initiative led by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is
the launching of the Montclair Book project, geared to providing an integrated
reading experience for incoming students in Writing and New Student Experience
and engaging the campus more generally in a discussion of the book in various
courses and extra-curricular settings.

Other
College initiatives geared to increasing students’ academic achievement outside
of class include the initiation of a language immersion area in the resident
halls. The College has also begun the
development of BA/MA programs that offer the opportunity for stronger students
to achieve a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in five years, and the BA/MA in
Psychology, one of our largest majors, is now in the final stages of curricular
review.

Strengthening
enrollment in the College’s graduate programs has been a challenge, and the
College has begun to turn its attention to those graduate students seeking
professional and work-related credentials, encouraging program development and curricular
changes providing a more focused student experience with clearer professional
outcomes. The College has also begun to
expand on-line graduate and post-BA offerings and specialized programs offered
off-site.

The
College of Science and Mathematics, under Dean Prezant’s leadership, has been
focusing heavily this year on strengthening its research activities, from
consideration of ballast water treatment in the Great Lakes to neural cell
proliferation to epidemiological modeling and ancient ice rafting. The College is working hard at establishing a
successful track record in federal grant acquisition and in building
partnerships with science-based corporations in the region.

A
particular focus of the College’s work has been on strengthening its programs
and reputation in areas related to the environment. In October, the new PSEG Institute for
Sustainability Studies was launched with a major international conference which
brought scientists and policy leaders from across the U.S. and Europe to
Montclair State, and the PhD program in Environmental Management continues to
attract increasing numbers of well-qualified students.

As one mark of the growing success of the College of Science
and Mathematics’ effort to make the expertise resident at the University better
known in the region, a number of members of the College have been invited to
hold seats on councils and committees within the New Jersey Department of
Environmental Protection, including Dr. Michael Weinstein and Prof. Paul
Bologna’s appointments to the Ecological Process Committee; Profs. Mark
Chopping and Gregg Pope’s appointments to the Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
Committee; Dr. Kirk Barrett to the Water Quality Committee; Prof. Dibs Sarkar
to the Emerging Contaminants Committee; and Dean Prezant was named to the
seven-member state Advisory Commission directed to recommend solutions to
chronic flooding in the Passaic River basin.
Service of this type on important state-wide initiatives is critical,
both for the expertise it provides to the consideration of important public
policy issues and for the recognition it brings to the quality of the faculty,
research, and programs of the University.

The
College of Science and Mathematics has also, this year, begun the
implementation of a critically important and very exciting project, the
development of a Math Emporium. This
project, based in part on a successful initiative at Virginia Tech and several
other emerging models around the country, has the capacity significantly to
expand the modalities we are able to use in the teaching of mathematics and
assuring the quantitative literacy of all of our students, which is so
important to work and life in today’s highly complex technological world.

The
College of the Arts, led by Dean Newman, has, in many ways, focused, like the
College of Science and Mathematics, on expanding and solidifying its reputation
in the region and nationally, although admittedly the disciplines in the two
colleges are somewhat different. The
faculty has worked hard at maximizing the opportunities for students’ work to
be seen or heard in important places and, as a consequence, the programs in the
performing arts continue to win awards and be recognized in national
venues.

Those
accomplishments have led to increasing student applications from highly
qualified candidates and that in turn, of course, leads to yet more
accomplishment. Both Theatre and Dance
were recognized, for yet another year, for national excellence in arts
education, and student performers were featured at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C. Our program in
Broadcasting has long been among the best in the region, and our Musical
Theatre program auditioned over 400 students for 25 places. Our students in Industrial Design have
recently won national awards, and, again, that significantly helps us build the
reputation and visibility of all of our programs in the visual arts.

Beyond
those initiatives in pushing forward both the quality and reputation of the
Arts programs, the College has been deeply engaged in considering how best to
organize itself as a very distinctive entity with a focus on professional
programs within the larger arts and sciences environment of the
University. The newly established John
J. Cali School of Music has served as a model for other College programs, and
this year faculty in Communication Studies, Broadcasting, and Film have been
working together on the development of a model for a new School of
Communication and Media Studies. At the
heart of their work has been the creation of a new approach to the curriculum
that integrates the experiences of students across all of the communications
and media disciplines with a focus on changes in these fields and emerging
technologies.

While
all of this activity has been happening in the academic units of the campus, Vice
President Pennington has engaged the division of Student Development and Campus
Life in working on initiatives that create a campus environment that gives our
students the best chance to succeed in their academic programs.

These
initiatives are heavily data-driven and they are based on three over-riding
objectives: first, to recruit and admit to the University a broad range of
highly qualified students fully reflective of the society we serve; second, to
do everything in our power to give those students the support they need to
convert that admission into the timely acquisition of a degree; and, third, to
enable those students to develop intellectually, socially, and in respect to
their characters in ways that will enable them to have lives in which they are
capable of taking care of themselves, capable of taking care of others, and capable
of contributing productively to society.

In support of
those goals, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions
has reevaluated the University’s admissions policies, and, after much research
and testing, they have developed a system of reviewing applicants that places less
emphasis on the SAT and greater emphasis on each student’s academic performance
in high school, thus acknowledging that the academic record acquired by a
student throughout four years of schooling serves as a better predictor of
student success than four hours spent taking a test.

By relying more heavily on a student’s grade point average
and the rigor of a student’s coursework, and evaluating other success
indicators such as a student’s performance on the Writing section of
standardized tests, we believe we will bring in new classes of students who are
more engaged and better prepared for college-level work. It is important to remember that in the
Admissions process, our professionals are culling through a universe that
consists of over 10,000 applications in the course of a year, but our
experience shows that the easiest way of accomplishing that task is not
necessarily the best way.

In a related effort, the Office of Financial Aid put significant
effort this year into making a successful conversion to the Federal Direct Loan
Program and into reassessing how the University is using the funds available
for scholarships to assure that all available dollars are being used most
effectively to recruit qualified students and to support them throughout their
time at the University.

The Division of
Student Development and Campus Life continues to increase its initiatives in
intrusive advising, and now, having data to show that its programs geared to freshmen
retention and success have had a positive impact, they are beginning the
development of programs geared toward sophomores.

More attention
by the colleges and schools to provide better and more intrusive advising by
the academic programs for students in their majors and especially at the junior
and senior levels is absolutely critical. It is an area where there is considerable divergence in quality across
programs, and the Office of Institutional Research is developing some reports
that will enable each department to see clear data about how well they are
doing at graduating their majors. It
will also identify those programs whose successes may be replicable.

On
the softer side of student development issues, the annual CIRP study always
tells us interesting things about our incoming freshmen. This year, we find once again that our
incoming male students continue to rate themselves more highly than our female
students on just about everything, including competitiveness, computer skills,
physical and emotional health, mathematical ability, popularity,
self-understanding, intellectual ability, and social self-confidence. Clearly, as a society, we have not yet
created an environment in which our daughters are getting the same degree of
encouragement as our sons. I do not
believe that we have any studies that would tell us whether or not our
students’ years at the University impact those self perceptions by gender, but
it would certainly be interesting to know.

Interestingly,
the CIRP study also reveals that over one-third of our entering students have
an above-average interest in spirituality, and, to meet that need, this spring
a Center for Faith and Spirituality was opened in the Student Center to provide
an environment in which all Montclair State student religious, spiritual, and
cultural groups can meet for prayer, meditation, and interfaith dialogue.

In
a similar vein, we will have approximately 5,000 students living on campus this
fall, and the Office of Residential Education and Services that looks after their
needs combined efforts with the College of Education’s Department of Counseling
and Educational Leadership to establish a campus Mediation Center. The Center is staffed by graduate students
and its goal is to help undergraduates understand how to live with other
people, working through differences, minimizing conflict, and focusing on
building community. The Center has had
good success in its first year in resolving roommate conflicts and reducing the
number of room changes. And in what will
be an increasingly used methodology for the University, the Center is currently
developing a Blackboard course on how to live with a roommate for prospective
residential students to take prior to arriving on campus.

Moving to
technology, central to Vice President Chapel’s agenda has been the Bell Tower
Initiative, which, when completed, will provide all members of the University
community with a suite of current, Internet-enabled applications that will
enhance and expand the way we work and provide timely and accurate information
to inform our planning and management decisions. As many of you are aware, this extremely
complex and challenging program has not proceeded according to plan.

Last October,
following a rigorous evaluation of the implementation process, we decided to
terminate our vendor and refocus our plans and approach to the project. We are
close to bringing on a project executive director with strong experience with
an administrative system implementation of this scope and complexity and a new
vendor. Although it has been frustrating
that we have faced these challenges, it is important to recognize that
substantial progress has been made, and we continue to be very confident that
the PeopleSoft product, once implemented, will serve us well, and that the
University is well positioned for success when the project resumes.

In other
IT areas, the Enterprise Software Services group, led by Carolyn Ortega, joined
forces with the Center for Academic Advising to develop the Student Academic
Monitoring Program. This application,
which won an exemplary advising services award from the National Academic
Advising Association, ensures that both students and advisors can have a common
understanding of students’ academic standing in their coursework and receive
timely notification of any academic issues.

The
University’s mobile computing capacity continues to grow as the Enterprise
Technology Services group, led by Jeff Giacobbe, proceeds with the second phase
of the Campus Wireless project, which is nearing its half-way point. In those buildings in which this service has
been activated and fully tested, members of the University community enjoy
access to all networked information services and applications using any mobile
computing device. The second phase of
the project is scheduled for completion this June.

As has been
noted, there has been an increased focus on the development of online courses
and fully online degree programs during this academic year. The Technology Training and Integration group,
led by Yanling Sun, has supported these efforts with the successful transition
to Blackboard 9.1, which features many social networking and Web enhancements.

IT is also working
closely with Provost Gingerich and Associate Provost Joanne Coté-Bonano to
design the online course templates and methodologies required to launch our
first fully online degree programs. Yanling’s
group has led a pilot video-on-demand service that provides for easy
integration of rich media content and videos into online courses, and they are
supporting the University’s efforts to test the Moodle open-source learning
management system, which represents an alternative that eliminates the high
annual license and maintenance fees associated with Blackboard and provides for
a greater range and flexibility in the tools available to develop course
content.

As our use of
online instruction increases at a rapid pace, it is critical that we monitor
closely the quality of those efforts. To
that end, the Office of Institutional Research, under the direction of Steven
Johnson, administered a very large online course evaluation effort this past
fall, working with 42% of all academic departments and interdisciplinary
programs, to evaluate 30% of all course sections and reaching out to 27% of all
course registrants.

Findings
indicate that 73% of students rated overall online instruction highly. Further, on the assessment front, the Office
of Institutional Research facilitated the first administration of the
Collegiate Learning Assessment instrument for our freshmen and seniors. This effort will yield combined
freshman-senior reports that will focus on gain. The findings will be analyzed and ready for
our spring 2012 Middle States Periodic Review Report (PRR).

Despite the fact
that virtually all of our students have access to computers, student demand for
loaner laptops on campus continues to grow. To meet that demand, Summer Jones, the Interim Director for Technology
Support Services, has expanded both the Library and the University Hall laptop
lending programs. And, beginning this month, the Solutions Center has launched
a nifty mobile application that will allow students to check the availability
of computers in the labs from their laptop or smart phone. Additional printers and print depot work
stations were also added to our public computing facilities to meet demand
during the busiest times of the semester.
The students’ appetite for these computing services just seems to grow –
the more we provide, the more they use, and the more they want, so the more we
provide, and on and on.

Vice President Bressler and the staff in University
Facilities have also managed to keep reasonably busy chasing campus
demands. We began the academic year opening
the new 300-bed Francis A. Sinatra Hall, and, as you can see, The Heights, our
new 2,000-bed student residential community is close to completion and will be
ready this summer for in-coming students.

This impressive facility has two major structures, each with
four large wings that will be separately named. The upper Heights also includes a beautiful dining facility. And with this facility, I think we have
accomplished all the new residential structures we will build for the time
being, although we will continue the phased renovation of our older
structures. Starting with the opening of
the Village at Little Falls in fall 2005, with the opening of The Heights this
fall, we will have added 3,131 beds to the campus over a period of six years. That is a lot of sleeping capacity.

In the late fall of 2010, we completed the College Avenue
Promenade Project, restoring and improving the sites surrounding Panzer and the
Cali School of Music. This major site
improvement, which is still getting a few finishing touches, has enhanced the
main University entrance from Normal Avenue to the Red Hawk Deck, improving
pedestrian pathways to the Kasser Theater and College Hall and beautifully
rebuilding the Freeman, Russ, Chapin Quad.

The
extraordinary new 40,000-square-foot facility for the Center for Audiology and
Speech-Language Pathology opened its doors at 1515 Broad St. in Bloomfield, and
in January 2011, renovations were
completed on the lower level of the Speech Building to accommodate the needs of
our growing program in Fashion Studies.
The renovation and addition to Finley Hall, which is converting that
facility into a home for Modern Languages and Linguistics, should be completed
this December. A portion of the third
floor of that facility will house the developing Math Emporium.

The new facilities for the School of Business and the new
Center for Environmental and Life Sciences are both advancing toward bidding
and construction and are scheduled for completion for fall 2013. In order to service these additional new
facilities and as our existing co-generation plant reaches the end of its
useful life, we are working on a new public/private partnership under the New
Jersey Economic Stimulus Act that will build a combined heating and cooling
power plant and all the associated campus infrastructure. This project will make a huge difference in
providing cost effective and more reliable heating and cooling to both our new
and older buildings.

CarParc Diem, the most beautiful Spanish mission-style parking deck in America,
opened this year with its 1,500 parking spaces.
We are now also the proud owners of the former site of Ward Trucking on
Clove Road, just north of the Village and just south of Route 46, which has
added 18 acres of property contiguous to our campus. Over the summer, the largest portion of this
site will be paved and striped to provide more parking, and the shuttle buses
will provide convenient access to those lots.

Additionally, this summer, we will, as always, undertake a
number of campus-wide renovation projects based on the priorities that have
been set by the various academic and administrative units and University
Facilities. So, as has been the case for
a number of years, we will continue to build, renovate, repair and improve
University facilities, and although, without any capital support from the State
going on for over 20 years now, we cannot keep up with the demands and needs of
all our programs, we are nevertheless making significant progress and
exploiting any possible opportunity to provide the infrastructure necessary to
support our programs and services.

What
I have just provided are merely glimpses at some of the excellent work that is
happening across the campus. As I said
earlier, it is important that we all know as much as possible about all these
activities so that we can leverage and support our campus-wide investments and
efforts. It is clear that all of these
important initiatives require resources and support, and, consequently, as the
share of total University revenue derived from state appropriations has declined
from 55% in 1995 to less than 26% in 2010, with Vice President Shannon’s
leadership, we have redoubled our efforts to attract other sources of funding from
alumni, corporations, foundations, and friends and to increase acquisition of
funding from federal and state agencies for programs and research. Among our successes this year were a number
of very large grants:

Our
new PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studies received over $600,000 from the
PSEG Foundation.

The
New Jersey School of Conservation, the University’s environmental education and
field research campus, led by Dr. Bill Thomas,
was awarded a $2.65 million competitive grant by the New Jersey Board of Public
Utilities. The
grant will allow the installation of a 300,000-watt solar farm, to be
operational in late 2011. The solar farm
will meet all of the School of Conservation’s electricity needs as well as
generate excess power for use by local utilities.

The
Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
awarded the University $250,000 to integrate the innovative work of Peak
Performances artists into the curricular life of the campus. It is worth noting that the programs
presented here in the Kasser Theater under Jed Wheeler’s direction have
received substantial recognition by TheNew York Times over 30 times this
year. There is no other performance
venue in the State that receives anything close to that kind of recognition,
and students have had the opportunity, throughout the year, to work with these
professional companies in master-classes and workshops, to perform with them, to
assist in production, and to attend open rehearsals.

The
University received a $260,000 grant from PNC Bank to partner with Sesame
Workshop to prepare teachers in seven counties to provide financial literacy
education to pre-schoolers. This grant
was particularly exciting because I got to meet Elmo, and I have the picture to
prove it. I have also now learned how “to
save, to spend and to share,” which, according to the educational materials,
apparently is best done by having three separate jars, so I have ordered some
jars for our Vice President for Finance and Treasurer, Don Cipullo.

Merck
and the Roche Foundation have provided $280,000 over several years to fund a
new honors program for upper division science majors called SHIP, the Science
Honors Innovation Program.

Members
of the faculty have been increasingly active and successful in attracting a
number of major grants. For example, in
Earth and Environmental Studies, Prof. Stefanie Brachfeld received a $451,000
grant and Prof. Mark Chopping a $182,000 grant, both from NASA. Prof. Elena Petroff from Biology and
Molecular Biology received $350,000 from the NIH, and Prof. MeiYin Wu, also of
Biology, received $673,000 from the U.S. Department of the Interior and the EPA.
Prof. Jennifer Brown of Family and Child
Studies has now received over $400,000 from the NSF, and Prof. Philip Yecko of
Mathematics received a $226,000 award also from the NSF.

These
grants, totaling to close to $6.3 million, represent only some among the many
successful grant initiatives by the University community.

I am also very
pleased that a number of our graduates and friends have chosen to honor their
former faculty and mentors at Montclair State by making generous gifts that
will support our facilities, programs, and students. Those so honored this year include:

Former
students, family, and friends of Professor Teresa de Escoriaza, who was a
beloved Spanish professor here from 1929 to 1959, raised funds to name a
seminar room for her that will be located in the newly renovated Finley Hall.

The
Coach Jerry Edwards Athletic Endowment Fund was created by former
student-athletes, including several members of the undefeated 1960 football
team, to honor their late coach and mentor.
So far, the group has given almost $50,000 for an endowed fund to
benefit athletics programs.

Dr.
S. Marie Kuhnen was an alumna from the class of 1941, a much admired biology
professor, and the first chair of Montclair State’s Biology Department. In addition to funds she left the University
in her will, her former students, colleagues, and friends have made donations
to create the S. Marie Kuhnen Scholarship in her memory.

Planned giving
is another growth area for the University, and this year, the University
received a number of significant estate gifts and pledges from retired
professors and alumni. And, in a new
development, it is now possible to make a contribution to the University online
via our Web site, which will be a great boon to our annual giving program. We anticipate that the online option will
increase our alumni participation rate by making giving easier.

This year’s Annual
Dinner, always the highlight of our fundraising season, will be held tomorrow night
in the University Hall Conference Center, and the theme is “Our Students Are
Your Business.” Our honoree will be
Douglas Kennedy, the president of the New Jersey division of Capital One
Bank. Mr. Kennedy is not only one of the
state’s most successful banking executives, but he has been a member of our
Board of Trustees for more than a decade and currently serves as Board Chair.

This year we
have significantly increased student participation in the Annual Dinner. Doug Kennedy and several other executives at
Capital One Bank trained ten School of Business students in the art of
networking, and these students will be practicing their skills, acting as hosts
and interacting with the guests throughout the evening.

In addition, a
group of students from an advanced studio design class worked under the
direction of Prof. Winfield Parsons to design and execute the fabrication of
the complete setting for the Dinner, turning the University Hall Conference
Center into a cityscape, with a 360-degree skyline and lighted
centerpieces. And, of course, no
University event would be complete without the participation of the wonderful performers
from the College of the Arts. Students
from our superb Musical Theater program will be providing their highly exuberant
entertainment at tomorrow night’s dinner.

Why do I stress
all this information about fundraising and grant getting? Back in the old days, public universities
could depend largely on government for the funds necessary to implement their
missions. It used to be quite normal,
when new programs or other initiatives were started, for funding for them to be
forthcoming from the state. In today’s
world, if I went to Trenton to ask for funding for a new program or for
expansion of a program with high demand or for any of the campus initiatives I
have spoken about, the folks in Trenton would look at me as though I were crazy
or just recently arrived from Mars. In
today’s world, fundraising and grant-getting are absolutely critical to our
ability to support our programs, our faculty, and our students.

Getting those
funds is greatly assisted by maintaining a very visible presence for the
University and a strong reputation, and, every time one or another unit or
member of the University community achieves recognition for the quality of what
they do, they are making a contribution to the vitality and reputation of the
whole institution. This year, there have
been many such instances of recognition, and I will mention only a few here:

Montclair
State was one of 12 colleges and universities selected to participate in a
National Genomics Research Initiative by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
and its Science Education Alliance. We
are the only academic institution in New Jersey participating in the program,
which has the goal of changing the way science is taught by giving students the
opportunity to engage in authentic research much earlier in their academic
studies.

The University was selected by the Woodrow
Wilson Fellowship Foundation as one of the host institutions at which Woodrow
Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Aspiring Teachers of Color may pursue MAT
degrees. Montclair State was one of just
27 institutions in the nation, and the only institution in New Jersey, selected
for this status.

Our graduate programs in secondary teacher
education and elementary teacher education were ranked in the top 20 in the
nation in the U.S. News & World
Report rankings of America’s Best Graduate Schools.

We
received the Wisniewski Award from the Society of Professors of Education, an
award given to an institution that has made “singularly significant
contributions to the theory and practice of teacher education.”

Montclair
State and the Newark Public School District were selected by The Council of the
Great City Colleges of Education to receive the Dr. Shirley S. Schwartz Urban
Education Impact Award for the Newark
Public Schools-Montclair State University Partnership for Instructional
Excellence and Quality Program.

Montclair State was named one of the “Top 100
Colleges for Hispanics” for the 13th year in a row by Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education magazine.

The
Education Trust recognized Montclair State as one of the most successful
institutions in the country in increasing the graduation rate of minority
students and in reducing the gap between the graduation rates of minority and
non-minority students.

The
National Academic Advising Association recognized the University for its
commitment to outstanding student advising services and programs.

The Princeton Review named Montclair
State “A Best Business School” and included the University in the first release
of its Guide to 286 Green Colleges.

Montclair State was named to the President’s
Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, the highest federal recognition
a college or university can receive for its volunteer, service-learning, and
civic engagement activities.

The University has made a serious effort to
provide appropriate programming and services for returning veterans, and, for
the second year, G.I. Jobs magazine
named Montclair State as one of the top military-friendly schools in the
nation, and the Military Times EDGE
magazine named the University among the top 100 “Best for Vets” colleges or
universities.

This year was also an outstanding year for faculty publications,
including both articles in highly regarded scholarly journals and books, and
these contributions to knowledge have a very positive impact on the
University’s reputation in the academic community and in those professional
arenas where that knowledge is put to practical use.

Looking to the
future, it is time for us to refresh our consideration of what kind of
university we want Montclair State to be. This question will be answered by our next strategic plan, which is
under construction. A first draft of the
Strategic Plan, “Draft A,” is currently being reviewed by each college, school,
and administrative division, the University Senate, and the Graduate Council. Recommended revisions are due June 1, and,
over the summer, those recommendations will be incorporated into a “Draft B,”
which will be circulated in September for final campus review and subsequent
adoption by the Board of Trustees.

As we gear up
for the work of the future, our capacity to achieve our goals will be enhanced
by the talents and energy of our growing full-time faculty and by several new
administrative additions to the campus community, who have joined us this year
and who I would like to introduce to you:

In University Advancement, we have two new
Associate Vice Presidents, Carol (the Blaze) Blazejowski and Jane Boyle. Carol, who will focus on the marketing side
of advancement, is a 1978 graduate of Montclair State, who returns to us from a
successful career in women’s basketball, having served as President and General
Manager of the WNBA’s New York Liberty. Jane Boyle, who will focus on the fundraising side, joins the University
having served as Executive Director of Development for the Elizabeth Seton
Pediatric Center in New York. In addition, Diane Reed has recently joined
University Advancement as our new Director of Media Relations.

In Human Resources, Michael Owen joins us as
Assistant Vice President for Employee Relations. Michael comes to us from Princeton
University.

In Student Development and Campus Life, we have
two new Executive Directors, Dominic Petruzzelli who will be heading up
Residential Education and Services and Daniel Jean, who will be leading EOF and
Academic Development. Deepak Munjal is
our new Associate Director for Financial Aid Operations, and you should also be
comforted in the presence of Michael Ricker who is our new Managing Director
for Emergency Preparedness.

So,
we have undertaken a considerable amount of work this year, we have
accomplished a great deal of what we set out to do, and, of course, the more we
do, the more there is that remains to be done. The truth is that each accomplishment inevitably yields the next
opportunity. And seizing opportunities
is who we are and what we do. Each
spring, we celebrate our successes and then we look resolutely forward to what
the future can hold for us. So, carpe diem! Thank you for all your hard work this year,
and let us go forth now to eat some ice cream!